Following World War I, archaeologists from Europe and the United States began several excavations throughout Iraq. To keep those finds from leaving Iraq, Gertrude Bell, a British intelligence agent, archaeologist, and director of antiquities in Iraq, in 1922 began collecting the artifacts in a government building in Baghdad. The Iraqi government moved the collection to a new building in 1926 and established the Baghdad Antiquities Museum, with Bell as its director. In 1966 the collection was moved again, to a two-story, 484,375-square-foot (45,000-square-metre) building in Baghdad’s Al-Ṣāliḥiyyah neighbourhood in Al-Karkh district on the east side of the Tigris River. With this move the name of the museum was changed to the National Museum of Iraq. About 3,000 items were looted from the museum following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. This sparked an international effort by law enforcement officials and archaeologists to catalogue and retrieve the missing items. In February 2009 the museum reopened after being closed for some six years; at that time it was estimated that only about one-quarter of the stolen items had been recovered.

The collections of the National Museum of Iraq include art and artifacts from ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Assyrian, and Chaldean civilizations. The museum also has galleries devoted to collections of both pre-Islamic and Islamic Arabian art and artifacts. Of its many noteworthy collections, the Nimrud gold collection—which features gold jewelry and figures of precious stone that date to the 9th century bce—and the collection of stone carvings and cuneiform tablets from Uruk are exceptional. The Uruk treasures date to between 3500 and 3000 bce.